Motivational quote: Walt Disney

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” Walt Disney (1901-1966) American business magnate, animator, producer, director, screenwriter and voice actor. Born in Chicago, Illinois.

Motivational quote: James Dean

“Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” James Dean (1931-1955) American actor, born in Marion, Indiana. First actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and the only actor to have had two posthumous acting nominations (for East of Eden and Giant).

Mastering Your Inner Game

By Dan Kennedy

WE’RE going to talk about the inner game of building your business. I believe that the inner game is simply all-important. 

“The inner game” is a new term for a classic idea explained many different times, many different ways by virtually every success educator, and even philosophers.

In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill reveals the secret using the words, “thoughts are things”. Denis Waitley has worked with U.S. astronauts and Olympic athletes on their inner games. 

Author Tim Gallwey explores the ideas of his books, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Selling.

Interestingly, there is a never-ending connection between the inner game in sport and the inner game in business, allowing experts like Waitley, Gallwey, ex-quarterback Fran Tarkenton and golfer Arnold Palmer, among others, to step back and forth between expounding on success techniques in the athletic and business worlds.

In all cases, these people speak much more about attitudes than aptitudes for a good reason. Surveys, studies and research consistently reaffirm that 85% of your success will depend on attitudinal factors, 15% on aptitude. Yet in your formal education and in most continuing education, the emphasis is on the opposite—15% on attitude, 85% on aptitude.

Certainly technical knowledge and skills are important. In your profession, you must deliver excellence based on your staying up to date in techniques, products, materials and ideas.

However, such excellence alone will never build a successful, growing, profitable business. The excellence that will is an excellence created and sustained in your own mind. This is the most difficult, least tangible aspect of building your business that we’ll ever talk about, but it is also probably the most important.

Yeah, but what is it? So what is the inner game? The way I see it, the inner game can be broken down into four major components:

The power of belief

By David Bradshaw

You can achieve virtually anything—
if you close your mind to the possibility of defeat.

SOMETIMES, watching tennis at championship level, I feel it’s like a graphic representation of life’s struggles.

Tennis is the most gladiatorial of all non-contact sports. It’s all about the will of one player to beat another. (It’s no coincidence that BBC Television used Hans Zimmer’s music for the movie Gladiator in the lead-up to its coverage of the Wimbledon finals.)

Obviously, talent, ability, and sheer tennis playing genius come into the equation, but when we’re talking about players at the top of their game, we can take that for granted.

What I find fascinating about the game is the psychology that lies behind it. I thought about this particularly back in 2010 when two players, Tomas Berdych from the Czech Republic and Samantha Stosur from Australia, then ranked No. 13 and No. 9 respectively, knocked out the reigning champions Roger Federer and Serena Williams at Wimbledon and Paris. 

Amazing

It didn’t really matter that ultimately they didn’t win the championships, in that they’d already achieved the near impossible: they’d beaten the top players in closely fought, knife-edge thrilling matches which had everyone watching on the edge of their seats.

Tomas and Sam may not have thought of it this way, but the finals were in a way something of an anticlimax. They already achieved amazing things. They beat the world’s leading players—because they believed they could.

Clearly, Berdych went into his match believing he could win. But Federer no doubt expected to win. And the same thing applied to Sam Stosur’s encounter with the apparently unbeatable Serena Williams. 

So belief won out over expectation in both cases. 

Or did it? 

The dividing line between the two mental states may be wafer thin, and is quite likely to alter in the course of the encounter. And according to author and quantum theory expert Phil Gosling in his book Luck Engineering, “Expecting something to happen is more powerful than willing it to happen”.

And in the matches under discussion, who’s to say that, for whatever reason, the two “underdogs” expected that something amazing was about to happen . . .  

Words of Wisdom from Self-Made Billionaires

(Click screenshot to watch video)

WHY restrict yourself to aspiring just to millionaire status when you could be thinking even bigger? 

Here, 20 billionaires (and a couple of mere millionaires) offer a few suggestions . . .

The Amazing Amazon Story—Jeff Bezos

(Click screenshot to watch video)

Jeff Bezos, the Internet entrepreneur and investor, is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, the largest retailer on the World Wide Web.

In 2012, Bezos was named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune magazine. As of August 2013, he is listed as one of the wealthiest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of $28 billion.

“The company that started out as a few guys in a garage has now revolutionized the way we buy everything from books to toys to clothes,” says Sean Blanda, managing editor and producer of 99u (the research and education arm of the Behance Network).
  

“Amazon is now one of the 100 largest companies in America, mostly thanks to bold long term plays like the Amazon Kindle.”

According to Wikipedia, Bezos is known for his attention to business details.

As described by Portfolio.com, he “is at once a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micro-manager; an executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases”.

Motivational quote: Zig Ziglar

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” Zig Ziglar (1926-2012) American author, salesman and motivational speaker. Born in Gary, Alabama. (Real name Hilary Hinton Ziglar).